ERA12CA275 · Air Tractor Inc AT-602
Boyle Flying Service Air Tractor Inc AT-602 · Accident: fuel exhaustion while maneuvering
From Boyle, MS to Boyle, MS
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12CA275
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Air Tractor Inc AT-602
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-602
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N51037
- Operator
- Boyle Flying Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boyle, MSTo Boyle, MS
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 137: Agricultural
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Maneuvering
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Fuel exhaustion
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on an aerial application flight with an estimated 53 gallons of fuel. He had not reset the fuel totalizer before departure. He made numerous passes over a 100-acre field spraying fertilizer during the 30 minute flight. After his last pass, the pilot noticed a fuel flow fluctuation. The engine subsequently lost power at an altitude of 75 to 100 feet above the ground, and the pilot made a forced landing. He pulled the airplane off the ground again briefly to clear an obstruction; however, when the airplane touched down again, the left main landing gear sank into soft ground and sheared off. The airplane rotated to the right onto its nose, and the left wing sustained structural damage. Postaccident examination revealed that the left and right main fuel caps had a tight seal and there was no evidence of streaking or venting of fuel on the airplane or on the ground. The left, right, header, and purge fuel tanks were drained and yielded about 34 total ounces of fuel—two ounces from the right fuel tank and 32 ounces from the header tank. The left and purge tanks contained no fuel. No preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures were found that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning and in-flight fuel management, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12CA275
- Event ID
- 20120410X34350
- Case number
- ERA12CA275
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 82253fc3552625c29235b850602f3aa66cab402d115e84e00e8c110e7ff2b19e; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:43:23.166Z.